In recent years a combination of an increase in printed materials such as books and magazines and a use of computers has led to a large production of computer printouts. The explosion of this production of information and paper has created problems for libraries that do not have sufficient storage space for these materials, furthermore, the books are often so large in size and heavy that a reader may find it inconvenient to handle the books. In addition, books are becoming increasingly expensive.
Therefore, it was desirable to have a digital reader in the form of an electronic book that presents the reader with a reading experience that approximates that of reading a printed book. Whereafter, the electronic book has been developed. The electronic book not only can store a lot of information, but is also portable. However, a conventional electronic book only displays text information, eyes of the user grows tired if read for a long time, decreasing reading interest of the user. Furthermore, if the user's eyesight is not very good, the electronic book is difficult to read it.
To solve such problems, some special electronic books have been developed. For example, one kind of electronic books displays images or texts thereof, and simultaneously plays background music. Image files or text files of the electronic book are generally associated with the audio files by below-described manners. These files include a same tag, or are encapsulated and compressed into a new file. However, these files cannot be played via normal playing programs. Furthermore, these manners cannot associate multimedia files in different format, and size of these files is so large that they are not easily stored.
Thus, an improved multimedia playing apparatus which can overcome the above-mentioned problems is desired.